TW Blog :: Archives for October 2005

CSS Any Order Columns - aka Holy Grail

Relates to CSS Design

PIE has published what they are arguing is the Holy Grail of CSS designs - fixed width sides and liquid centre. It actually comes as an appendix to a vast collection of resources on the one true layout, including any order columns.

I have been practicing and voraciously arguing for the acceptance of just these techniques for page layout and sub-content placement in CSS design since my article on CSS negative margins back in July 2004 [NB. At the time of that article a balancing unit was required in certain browsers (e.g. Mozilla 1.5 and below) but this is no longer the case - bar more recent browser bugs]. Despite the obvious semantic benefits and the power they provide for combining fixed, liquid and elastic columns in a single layout little acceptance had been given for these techniques until now.

So it is nice to know that finally with their publication on PIE the use of CSS negative margins instead of manipulation of document semantics might now become a valid and accepted CSS technique by the higher powers.

Thanks to Alex (Robinson) the author of In Search of the One True Layout who has been very gracious to acknowledge my previous work on any order columns (still filtering through to the PIE site at this time of writing). I guess I wasn't as voracious as I had thought in pushing these techniques to the CSS community and my failure to publish my findings on CSS-discuss was in hindsight careless. I should emphasise I had intended to publish an extended article demonstrating further the different combinations and browser/platform compatibilities but simply never found the time to complete it. As I said to Alex I think this was for the best since his article is an excellent resource, well written and expressed in english I could never hope to achieve! Plus of course it has the PIE endorsement.

As a final point of note for the historical records, this site was actually my first implementation of the negative margins technique (of course principally in a two column form) where I wanted content prior to the left hand navigation. While I do not know the exact date I released this design, the Wayback archive confirms the CSS was implemented prior to 27th January 2004 (although slightly scrambled by the archive). Shortly after I saw Ryan Brill's proposal on Mezzoblue and inspired by PIE's own work.

Posted on Wednesday, Oct 26, 2005 at 15:13:49.